


Warning: contents may be queer (Handle with care)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: (but danny is not that much better), Coming Out, First Kiss, Fluff, Humor, M/M, set ambiguously in early season 10, steve's a little jealous and a lottle oblivious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27710897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny, Steve sometimes thinks, should probably come with a few warning labels. Something like “beware, will yell without provocation” and “bites as well as barks” and “could lead to unexpected gay thoughts”. Or maybe that last one’s just Steve.He kind of doubts it, though.Or: Steve is glad to see Danny has finally accepted Hawaii as home, but he’s less glad that guys keep hitting on Danny out of absolutely nowhere. They have a talk about it, kind of.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 25
Kudos: 348





	Warning: contents may be queer (Handle with care)

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you need plot and heavy emotions and deep explorations of characters’ psyches. Sometimes you need the exact opposite of that. This is the latter.

Danny, Steve sometimes thinks, should probably come with a few warning labels. Something like “beware, will yell without provocation” and “bites as well as barks” and “could lead to unexpected gay thoughts”. Or maybe that last one’s just Steve.

He kind of doubts it, though.

He was still the first, at least as far as he’s aware, so he feels plenty justified in wanting to sneer at the guy who sells them their malasadas and then slips one more than they asked for into the bags and offers Danny a receipt with a phone number scrawled on it, even though Steve paid and was already holding out his hand. Danny just grins, stuffs the receipt in his pocket and gives the guy a mock salute in parting.

Steve is still offendedly hovering by the register when Danny sticks his head back in through the door he just left out of to see what’s taking so long. The guy behind the counter lights up a little the moment Danny’s back in view. Steve bites the inside of his cheek and gets his ass in gear, because this is getting embarrassing.

It’s been happening all day, is the worst of it. When Danny came into work that morning, his disposable coffee cup didn’t just have a near approximation of his name written on it, but also the first phone number of the day (that Steve is aware of) and a winky face and _call me_. At the crime scene they got sent to, Officer Moreno, who Steve has always found to be a sharp and level-headed individual in the past, took one look at Danny, then another, and then just kept staring, even while Steve was asking him questions about the state of the scene when HPD first arrived. 

Then there was the witness they interviewed who kept trying to touch Danny’s arm like he’d never seen shirt-covered biceps before, there was the random lumberjack they passed in the street who shamelessly winked at Danny, the guy in the leather jacket at the next table over at lunch who _leered_ , and even Lou’s eyes kept wandering over to Danny during the afternoon briefing, though at least Steve is pretty sure Lou was interested in the tiny button pinned to Danny’s shirt pocket and not in Danny’s ass.

The way the day’s been going, that was a nice change of pace.

They take their malasadas back to the office, where everyone is busy at their own desk trying to dig up information to get the current case unstuck from where it hit a wall. In ten years as a leader, Steve has found that plying his team with baked goods can be a surprisingly effective motivator, and also makes for a good reason to skip out for a moment on days when he’s feeling restless. He and Danny each take one of the bags of malasadas (one too many in total, Steve remembers bitterly) and make the rounds, distributing pastry to everyone who wants some and gathering updates as they go. 

They meet up again by the tech table. Danny is already leaning against it while trying to stuff an entire malasada in his mouth at once when Steve comes out of his own office, where Quinn is currently seated at his desk because the latest team expansion translated into a shortage of office space.

The bag Danny is holding-

“Another one?” Steve asks, before he can stop himself. He should be focused on the mission, but he keeps getting distracted. Obviously it’s the fault of everyone around them, because if they’d just stick to their own business, then so could Steve.

“Hmm?” Danny asks, chewing and swallowing and licking his fingers clean of powdered sugar.

Steve runs straight into the tech table upon approach. “Phone number,” he says, pretending he totally intended to smack his hip into a hard object. “On the bag. Guy must’ve been desperate, if he gives it to you twice.”

“You noticed that, huh?”

That’s such a stupid question it’s barely worth answering. Of course Steve noticed. It’s his _job_ to notice things. Duh. “Guys have been doing doubletakes of you all day,” he says, because if Danny wants to talk about things Steve noticed, well, there’s another one.

Danny hops up on the edge of the table. He’s sitting on the non-techy wooden frame, not on the actual touch sensitive screen, but Steve is pretty sure it would still be enough to make Chin either cry or threaten violence if he were on the island. Danny drops the now empty paper bag on what’s definitely the touch sensitive part, number side up. “What are you saying? I’m not worth a doubletake?”

“That’s not what I said at all.” It’s good to occasionally reaffirm you haven’t gained the ability to stare holes into something. That bag would’ve been torn to shreds if Steve had.

“Then how come that’s what I’m hearing?”

“I guess there must be something wrong with your ears.” Steve, still disappointingly un-laser eyed, tears his attention away from the bag to find Danny studying him like _he’s_ the interesting thing here. His eyes naturally end up straying down from Danny’s face, to the thing that made his heart swell a little when Danny showed up for their carpool that morning wearing it, because it’s a sign of something for which Steve’s been hoping for a long time. “Why are you wearing that button?”

Danny looks down at his own chest, like he’s not perfectly aware of what Steve is talking about. He flicks the button, a little round thing with horizontal rainbow stripes, and it makes a dull pinging sound. “What, this one?”

“Yeah, that one,” Steve says, getting a little impatient with all this faffing about. Never mind that that’s what he’s been doing all day, too chickenshit to ask. He finally asked now, so Danny owes him an answer. When Danny doesn’t immediately provide one, he starts fishing, because he needs to hear a yes. “Did you come around on Hawaii? Finally showing some new home state pride?”

Danny whips his head up with more bemusement than Steve expected. He doesn’t look angry or offended for once, just confounded and, dare Steve think it, a tiny touch endeared. Either that, or worried. “ _Hawaiian_ pride? You’re not serious.”

That’s not good. That’s the opposite of good. Steve is seeing all his hopes and dreams to finally hear Danny say that Hawaii is pretty great and he’s well and truly settled and never going back to Jersey fly out the window, away from sun and beach and towards gloom and skyscrapers.

Steve frowns, crosses his arms, and kind of feels like slamming his hip into the table again, because physical pain is a lot less excruciating than awkward conversations with heavy emotional stakes. “How is this a weird thought?” he asks, too defensive. He’d love to play it a little more cool, but he seems to have lost that ability somewhere along the way as he watched everyone they met try to get into Danny’s pants just because he lives here now. “We’re in paradise. Rainbows are everywhere.” 

Danny stares at him.

Steve crosses his arms harder. No backing down.

“Steve,” Danny says. “Have you ever in your life seen a gay pride flag?”

“Of course.” 

“Right,” Danny says.

“Right,” Steve echoes.

He looks at the button again. He’s very suddenly starting to suspect a miscalculation may have been made along the way.

His hopes plummet and soar at the same time, which leaves him feeling a little upside-down.

Danny waves a hand at nothing, nodding with a healthy dose of sarcasm. “Okay, good. I was growing worried your Navy indoctrination ran so deep anything that’s less than hetero just gets blurred out, but then again, you seem to be able to see me, so there’s that.”

“Well yeah,” Steve says, because alright. Huh. Yes on that miscalculation, it seems. “I can see myself in the mirror, too,” he adds, while his brain is still working on how Danny was apparently doing social studies while Steve kept trying to do geography.

“Okay.” Danny gives a dry, mirthless laugh. “My mistake, then.” He bows his head for a second and then hops off the table. He seems a little out of sorts, and Steve is watching him, trying to figure out which crucial bit of information he’s missing this time, when Danny brushes off his hands like he didn’t already suggestively lick them clean and says, “So, this case.”

“The Patterson case,” Steve supplies. His mouth is working mostly independently from his brain at this point.

“Yes.” There’s a moment that Danny seems to expect Steve to fill, but when Steve doesn’t, Danny picks it up. “What did you find out?”

It’s at this point Steve realizes that Danny is genuinely attempting to make a conversational U-turn right back into work. “Hey, wait,” he says, because things are going from just upside-down to also backside-front.

Danny peers at him critically. “For what?” 

Steve flounders a bit. “Don’t you think we should talk?” Danny’s follow-up question is predictable, so Steve pre-empts it. “About, you know, how apparently we both like-” The words get a little tangled in his mouth there. Guys? Each other? That’s jumping to conclusions. “Rainbows,” he forces out, awkwardly.

Danny does an incredulous thing with his face and head and hands, but at least he stops trying to pull the car around while they were speeding right at something big. “I thought you weren’t interested.”

That’s so wrong Steve can’t quite wrap his head around it. It’s his turn to loudly project incredulity. “Why?”

“You didn’t react to my new accessory choices at all. Business as usual.”

“I’ve been staring at you all day,” Steve says, because Danny’s facts are fundamentally right, but his conclusion is still laughable. Steve feels a little better about his own shortcomings as a detective.

Danny, who is a stubborn ass, doesn’t get it. “No more than normal.”

Yeah, Steve thinks, unlike some people, who are just opportunistically hopping on the bandwagon right now. He doesn’t say that out loud because it might come across as a little bitter. “If I did it any more, I’d keep running into walls,” he points out instead. He motions at the wood next to them and his own thigh. “I literally just now walked into a table that’s only been here for a decade.”

Danny opens his mouth. Danny closes his mouth. Danny takes a deep breath and gives his head a shake. “Would it actually hurt you to just say you like me?” he asks, because of course, of fricking course, this would be the one time in the history of anything that Danny Williams has no patience for talking in circles.

Steve can roll with that, though. He’s good at the direct approach. Usually. When he actually knows where he’s going, which apparently, right now he does not. “How was I supposed to know there was a possibility you’d like me back that way?”

Danny drily plucks at the pin on his chest. “Oh, I don’t know, that’s a tough one. Obviously there have never been any glaring signs delivered to right in front of your nose. It’s not like I poked holes in one of my best shirts for you.” 

“Danny,” Steve tries.

“I mean,” Danny continues, without so much as a break to take a breath, “this totally wasn’t all just to see if you’d finally catch a clue if it gets smacked in your-”

“Danny, shut up.”

Danny straightens to his full height, which is still not actually that much, but he makes every inch of it count. “No, I will not shut up. Holes! In my shirt, Steve! Guys hitting on me all day-”

Steve nods along. “Must be hard being so hot.”

“Yes, it is. Thank you for recognizing my plight.” Danny, seemingly feeling understood now, calms down a bit. “You think I’m hot?”

That’s the absolute final straw. “I’m in love with you!” Steve thinks, very loudly, and also shouts at approximately the same volume right at Danny’s face. “Of course I think you’re hot.”

Danny, because he is Danny, yells right back. “Those two are not necessarily mutually inclusive!” It sounds like something more would have followed – and Steve is very curious to know how Danny was going to follow up a sentence like that in a fight about… something, Steve’s forgotten why they were shouting about their attraction to each other, exactly – when they’re interrupted by the door to Steve’s own office swinging open.

Quinn is holding it, body language on the brink of annoyed. “What’s happening out here? I can’t read boring numbers if you keep yelling.”

Steve looks at Danny and Danny looks at Steve. Danny rolls his eyes and takes pity on Quinn, who’s waiting for an answer. “I’m trying to seduce Steve, but he won’t stop telling me I’m hot.”

Quinn inclines her head, seems to consider that for a second, and then nods. “This is not what I’m getting paid for,” she says, and turns around and disappears back into Steve’s office.

There are a few seconds of silence after her departure. “Is that why no one else has come out to check on us?” Danny wonders. His decibel level is back to normal conversational tones now.

Steve, thinking the same thing, makes the mistake of looking around at all the glass walls surrounding them, which gets him brief accidental eye contact with Junior peering around a computer screen as if to see if he needs to call 911 now that it’s gone quiet. Junior ducks back behind the monitor immediately, but it’s a stark reminder that the middle of Five-0 headquarters is perhaps not the best spot to have private conversations. 

Danny seems to have reached the same conclusion. “Yeah,” he says, when Steve makes eye contact with him, and they also both look away immediately, if for different reasons. “We should, uh-”

“Patterson case,” Steve says.

“Yes,” Danny agrees.

“Okay,” Steve says.

Danny bounces his head a little, and Steve breathes in, and then they both fly forward. Steve reels Danny in by the waist and Danny pulls Steve closer by his shoulders and they’re kissing, and they’re slightly off balance so they spin 270 degrees around their own combined axis until Steve hits something solid at hip-level that settles them and they’re still kissing, and he flips them again so he can hoist Danny up onto the table and that’s a different angle and an entirely new kiss that they’re still kissing all of a sudden, and Danny shows his approval by making a fist in the fabric of Steve’s shirt like he wants to rip it off with his bare hands and Steve tries the same but Danny’s courageous button-down is already straining so he just pulls it from the back of Danny’s pants so he can snake a hand up under there and they’re _still kissing_ , and then Steve takes a big step back and they’re not.

It feels like somebody hit play on reality, which had been paused for a brief moment. 

After a frozen second, time starts ticking again as well. Danny slides off the table, a little more carefully than last time, and begins the process of tucking his shirt back in so he looks marginally less like someone who has just been attacked. Steve attempts to pull his own clothes back into shape, but some permanent disfigurement may have occurred.

He thinks he can also quite literally see his heart beat in his chest. “So that was-”

When he looks up, Danny is running a hand over his hair, which Steve hadn’t even realized he messed up. “Very productive,” Danny says. He brushes his own chest and realizes there’s something missing, and Steve spots it first, lying on the floor a few feet away after it apparently sprung free.

He picks it up and offers it to Danny, who shakes his head. “Keep it. I think you figured out my intention.”

Steve spins the little button around so the rainbow faces up. He can only look at it with a peculiar wistful fondness now. Oh, to be the version of him from an hour ago, angrily confused and not knowing what still lay in his future.

He opens the pin on the back and carefully pins it to Danny’s shirt pocket. A warning label: belongs in Hawaii with his partner.

Danny’s face is conflicted. “More holes in my shirt.” 

“It looks good on you,” Steve says, and Danny’s expression softens.

“You know, speaking as a person who’s in love with you too, we really need to stop standing this close while you tell me I look good if we want to get anything else done today.”

Steve laughs, startled, but in a way that leaves him feeling very warm. “Okay, so what do you propose we do?”

“Well-” Danny casts around and finds his answer in the form of his own earlier littering. He plucks the empty malasada bag with the scribbles from the touch screen. “I’m going to throw this away.”

“Good,” Steve says, wholeheartedly. “That seems like a really great idea.”

Danny waves the bag at him. “Of course you’d think so.”

Steve’s ego decides that they maybe shouldn’t get into his confused moments of jealousy again. “I’m gonna go call the Governor and give her an update.”

“On our total lack of progress?”

“Only in the case.”

Danny starts to grin, but it abruptly derails into a horrified look. “Hey, don’t tell the Governor we kissed.”

Steve doesn’t. He also doesn’t tell her that he didn’t recognize a pride flag waving right in front of him or that Danny apparently can’t pick up on ten years of lovelorn staring, because he’s not ready for a forced retirement just yet. (Not that anything remains a secret for very long after Tani tweets a short video taken from behind a glass wall of two men spinning around and bumping into a table, but that’s a different problem.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Have a nice day and/or night (or not, I can't tell you what to do), and consider leaving a comment if you feel like it. ❤ 
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
